A Study of User Model Based Link Annotation in Educational Hypermedia

Abstract: Adaptive link annotation is a new direction within the field of user-model based interfaces. It is a specific technique in Adaptive Navigation Support (ANS) whose aim is to help users find an appropriate path in a learning and information space by adapting link presentation to the goals, knowledge, and other characteristics of an individual user. More specifically, ANS has been implemented on the WWW in the InterBook system as link annotation indicating several states such as visited, ready to be learned, or not ready to be learned. These states represent an expert’s suggested path for an individual user through a learning space according to both a history-based (tracking where the user has been), and a prerequisite based (indexing of content as a set of domain model concepts) annotation. This particular process has been more fully described elsewhere Brusilovsky, Eklund Schwarz 1998. This paper details results from an investigation to determine the effectiveness of usermodel based link annotation, in a real-world teaching and learning context, on learning outcomes for a group of twenty-five second year education students in their study of databases and spreadsheets. Using sections of a textbook on ClarisWorks databases and spreadsheets,